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14 September 2010

The Empirics of Law Faculty Scholarly Impact -- Updated

As many in the law school world know, last spring Brian Leiter (Chicago) updated his quantitative study of law schools' scholarly impact (description and results here). As Leiter's study focuses on the proverbial "Top 25" law schools, Greg Sisk et al. (University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)) expanded Leiter's study to include the nation's "Top 70" law schools in a recent paper. (For a brief summary of Sisk's findings, see Leiter's description here.) As Leiter notes, one striking finding in the Sisk study involves a small handful of law schools where the "scholarly impact" and U.S. News rankings dramatically differ.

UPDATE #2: A revised version (with a few technical corrections) of the Sisk et al. paper is found here. Further commentary on the paper, including commentary on some of the technical corrections, is found here, here, and here.